Forum focuses on mining safety

About 700 people are expected to attend Australia's largest mining safety conference starting in north Queensland today.

The three-day event in Townsville will look at a range of issues including fatigue management, bullying and mental health.

The Queensland Commissioner for Mine Safety and Health, Stewart Bell, says road safety will also be a priority.

"We still have a lot of accidents with people being run over by vehicles or vehicles colliding with each other," he said.

"There's technologies we're bringing into place to assist in that area and the other big one is fatigue.

"There's a fatigue guideline that's been worked on for sometime that'll be released shortly to look at ways of minimising fatigue from people who finish a large number of shifts - for argument's sake - and then drive back to the coast to their families."

Mr Bell says the forum will also look at a range of physical and mental health matters.

"We've focused very heavily on the mechanical aspects of mining if you like, the mining things that we've pretty well solved," he said.

"But the softer health issues are harder things to solve, so mental health issues, fatigue are more difficult but now we're turning our attention to those."